The 2020 Ann Arbor Jewish Book Festival will be held online, with most events free and open to the public. The annual festival celebrating Jewish authors is organized by the Jewish Community Center of Ann Arbor and is supported by the Jewish Federation of Ann Arbor. Go to book.jccannarbor.org to see the full list of events throughout November and December.
Three of this year’s events will be moderated by Frankel Center for Judaic Studies faculty. Samuel Shetzer Associate Professor of American Jewish Studies Julian Levinson will host an event with Miriam Udel on Sunday, December 13, 11 am. Udel is an associate professor in German studies at the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University. She will be discussing Honey on the Page: A Treasure of Yiddish Children’s Literature, an unprecedented treasury of Yiddish children’s stories and poems enhanced with original illustrations.
Honey on the Page holds nearly fifty stories and poems for children, translated from the original Yiddish. Arranged thematically, the book takes readers from Jewish holidays and history to folktales and fables, from stories of humanistic ethics to multi-generational family sagas. Featuring many works that are appearing in English for the first time, and written by both prominent and lesser-known authors, this anthology spans the Yiddish-speaking globe—drawing from materials published in Eastern Europe, New York, and Latin America from the 1910s, during the interwar period, and up through the 1970s. With its vast scope, Honey on the Page offers a cornucopia of delights to families, individuals, and educators seeking literature that speaks to Jewish children about their religious, cultural, and ethical heritage.
On December 15 at 7 pm, Assistant Professor Devi Mays will join author Sarah Stein as she presents her book, Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century. The 2019 release was named one of the best books of the year by The Economist, won New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and was a National Jewish Book Award finalist.
Sarah Stein is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, and holds the Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA. She is the author or editor of several books, including Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century and Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce. She is the recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, three National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Jewish Book Awards.
In her newest book, Family Papers, Stein uses the Levy family’s correspondence to tell their history. For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree.
Sol Drachler Professor of Social Work and Director of the Jewish Communal Leadership Program, Karla Goldman will moderate an event with author Esther Safran Foer on December 17 at 1 pm, as she presents her book, I Want You To Know We’re Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir. Esther Safran Foer is a writer and the former Executive Director of Sixth & I Synagogue in Washington, DC. After learning that her father had a previous wife and
daughter, both killed during the Holocaust, Foer travels to Ukraine to learn about them and how her father survived during the war. Her memoir is the poignant and deeply moving story not only of her journey, but of four generations living in the shadow of the Holocaust. They are four generations of survivors, storytellers, and memory keepers, determined not just to keep the past alive but to imbue the present with life and more life.
